Postcards from Abu Dis (5): More Miracles in the Holy Land?

Ramadan just started a couple of days ago, and I’m already wiped out from fasting. The fast is just too long. It starts at 3:54 am and doesn’t end until 7:48 pm: no food, no drink, no coffee. No coffee….

Fasting used to be easier when I was a kid. Somehow, back then, I had the capacity to fast and then play basketball or go to track practice. When did I become such a soft and pathetic wimp?

The thing is, I had planned to go to Jerusalem today, but canceled those plans at the last minute, because, due to fasting-fatigue, I hadn’t gotten any work done over the last few days. So I stayed home today and finished some of that work instead, fighting the ravages of my confused metabolic system.

An Israeli border policeman was critically wounded in a stabbing attack at the Damascus Gate in Jerusalem Sunday morning. The officer was stabbed in the neck, but managed to shoot the attacker before collapsing.

“When we arrived, we found a young man around 20 lying unconscious with a number of stab wounds to his upper body,” Magen David Adom paramedic Aharon Adler told Haaretz.”

“We immediately provided life-saving treatment and evacuated him to Shaare Zedek hospital in very serious condition.” The officer’s condition stabilized after undergoing surgery, the hospital said Sunday afternoon.

According to an Israel Police spokesperson, the perpetrator was an 18-year-old Palestinian who lives in the West Bank. He was evacuated to Hadasah, Ein Kerem hospital in critical condition.

Following the incident, security forces began combing the area with police helicopters.

As a friend of mine laconically put it: “It wasn’t a good day to go to Jerusalem.”